TRAVEL CAN SPARK CASUAL SEX, SPOUSAL JEALOUSY

Business travel creates sexual opportunities and dilemmas for both men and women. Although most business people of both sexes handle coed travel professionally, it can create ticklish situations that reverberate back to the home office. In the second of three excerpts from her book Corporate Romance, Leslie Aldridge Westoff explores the issues raised by out-of-town trips, tells what really goes on at business conventions and talks about the jealous spouse.

Men and women traveling together present an awkward problem for business people. Is it an automatic signal for the couple to go to bed? How do you get out of such a delicate situation?

The budget director of a large East Coast corporation said she spent a couple of weeks in a motel at a special in-house training course and was the only female with 30 men. There was no problem. They knew her well enough to understand what her attitudes were toward her job and her life. Sometimes, she thought, they seemed to forget she was a woman, which was the way she wanted it.

A banker told me she has traveled with many men over the years and never played around. She would be with the same men all over California and Florida, and "we were always as professional as we could be. Nobody ever made a pass at me." They were always equals or she was the superior officer. Sometimes they would go out and dance, but there was never anything suggestive.

Most men and women seem to be able to handle it professionally by sending out signals indicating their interest in extracurricular activities. Young couples who have always known each other in a professional context understand that travel is part of the job and they trust each other. But if they are looking for the opportunity, it is there.

One vice president remarked, "I've seen people who've been married for some time, and when they get on the road, they think it's a vacation. They think, 'I'm away from home and no one will know what I'm doing.' This is probably more common among men than women. They say 60 percent of men are unfaithful to their wives at some point. Is it fair to say that 60 percent of men on the road fool around?"

THE CONVENTION CAPER

"Switching rooms happens," said a lawyer, "but I think it's overestimated. I'd be surprised if, in a professional convention where people came from all over the country, it happens more than 10 percent of the time."

However, others disagree about convention behavior. One executive commented with a jaundiced eye, "On trips, the conventions are one long pajama party."

A pharmaceutical executive said: "As much sex goes on at conventions as the males can arrange. Many try to get an assistant they can legally take along. Or you see them maneuvering very early in the meeting toward the attractive young women. It's 'Let's just have a little fun when we're away from home.' That goes on everywhere."

One simple explanation for bad behavior or the sexual blunders many men make comes from the Management Institute of the University of Wisconsin. In 1980, Alma Baron, a professor of management, queried 30,000 male managers about their attitudes, and received responses from 8,000 of them. Reacting to the statement, "Men do not know how to deal with women executives in social situations," 38 percent agreed. In other words, more than one-third of the male executives are apt to make foolish social mistakes because of their confusion over women's new executive roles and, as a result, tumble back into the inappropriate, sexually conditioned responses they grew up on.

THE JEALOUS SPOUSE

One of the casualties of corporate romance is the jealous spouse -- in most cases so far, the wife. Not only do male and female executives work together in the office, but they now often travel together, a bitter reality for stay- at-home wives to accept. Husbands who work are more likely to be understanding when their wives travel, but they don't necessarily like it either.

An executive told me about a meeting her company once had for 60 sales reps, their spouses and managers in Florida near Walt Disney World. Late one night, a group of single female employees were sitting in a hot tub with some of the guys who had been drinking a little too much, and some of the wives were just outraged. They went to the district manager to complain about these women of low moral character. It is interesting to note that they didn't complain about the single men who were there; they complained only about the women.

A wife told a female executive who had recently been divorced and was no longer being invited to the homes of the married male executives: "Well, you have to realize that wives are very nervous about finding out that the woman their husbands travel with is divorced and available. You're just like a red flag, and you trigger all kinds of emotions."

A director of human resources said: "A lot of wives really put their foot down and did not want their husbands traveling with women, or even driving home at night with a woman. I'd get all the complaints. The wives would call. They'd scream at me." She used to schedule who went on what projects. She'd put the teams together, matching them according to the needed skills.

"A wife called me once and said, 'I'm sorry, my husband's not going because Jane's on that trip.'

In another case, a husband called the office and wanted to know exactly where his wife was. She was away on a trip, he had phoned her and she wasn't in her room. "He screamed at us for not keeping tabs on our people," the manager said. The couple had recently been married and the wife was used to being independent and apparently was continuing in that tradition after her marriage. One day the husband stormed into the office. The human resources director told the husband, "Sorry, we are not in the business of worrying about what our employees do after hours." The husband was absolutely irate, the director remembered, "but this woman did her job, and her private life did not affect her performance at all, though heaven knows what she was doing at night."

In another example of male jealousy, a husband whose wife recently fell in love with the president of a large corporation is so angry with her and the company that in his own business, a key industry in the area, he is boycotting the other company's products.

Sometimes, crushed by suspicion and frustration, a spouse will write to the head of a company and complain. In one such case, a woman wrote to the top boss, lamenting that her husband, the father of their several children, was abandoning their 22-year marriage, divorcing her and going to live with a much younger woman who worked in another part of the corporation. The wife asked, "What kind of behavior are you encouraging? Your company is to blame for the wreck of my marriage."

The marriages of the '80s and '90s, with both partners working in a business setting more and more often, are going to have to be strong enough to stand the pressure of competition. One might well formulate a proposition stating that the degree of jealousy in a spouse is inversely related to the quality of the marriage. The more jealousy, the less substantial the marriage. Where a marriage is good, working and traveling with other men and women should provide variety, interest and a lot of stories to share over a glass of wine.